^{CHITTER CHATTER}

No Cake for Musk

The drama continues in the Musk v. Altman trial, which is both ridiculous and serious, in that it “could have “major implications for OpenAI, but ridiculous in some of the verbiage, like Musk repeatedly saying, “You can’t just steal a charity.” … and “What you can’t do is have your cake and eat it too”, in reference to his accusation that Altman and Brockman (OpenAI President and co-founder) were “enriching themselves from a charity while also reaping the positive associations that come from running a non-profit.”

Over at Wired, Brockman testified that he thought giving Musk control of OpenAI would be a dictatorship and said that at a meeting in August 2017, about this, he and Sutskever (another OpenAI co-founder and its then chief scientist) resisted Musk’s attempts for control over OpenAI which made Musk angry to the point that Brockman said, “I actually thought he was going to hit me, physically attack me.”

Oh dear. Still, I guess for Brockman, Musk’s potential threat of violence was worth it. He’s now a billionaire - on paper anyway.

Using AI to Pretend You’re Using AI

KPMG in the US is surveilling employees via a ‘dashboard’ to track who’s using AI (and they’re not the only company doing this), but apparently, some staff at KPMG are “gaming the game” by using AI to “automate systems to run prompts on the weekends to keep the usage metrics high.” 😆 Full story here.

ChatGPT Plans Its Own Party. Okay.

This one’s a bit tech cultish and absurd, especially when you read the article in full. I asked Chat to summarise, of course, the story as reported in Business Insider: Sam Altman reportedly asked Chat to plan its own launch party to celebrate being upgraded to GPT-5.5. The model apparently suggested May 5, short speeches, a toast from its human creators, and a feedback station for future model ideas (Okay, Edith the human thinks that’s a good idea). Altman described the requests as “beautiful” but “strange.” Edith again: “Sam Altman would respond in the lame way he did, because he doesn’t have a technical bone in his body and has no idea how any of this works. Come to think of it, I don’t either. 😄 But what I do know is that it’s just lines of coke. I mean code, ‘lines of code.’ 🤣

^SUBTEXT

The Waffle: “Our engineers are now orchestrating fully autonomous digital task forces, and building at a faster velocity.” — Sundar Pichai, CEO, Alphabet and Google, at the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call.

Earnings calls are filled with gobbledegook/tech/corporate speak to make it all sound exciting. But translated, here’s what Sundar actually said, “Our engineers are using AI agents to code faster”.

A workplace survival disorder in which employees develop an allergic reaction to being told they have to use AI for every task, including tasks previously managed by a brain, a keyboard and four seconds of common sense. Symptoms: Quietly writing the thing yourself, then asking AI to “make it sound more AI” so the dashboard lights up and everyone claps. Side effects: Sudden creativity in pretending to use approved tools, including fake prompt histories, strategic chatbot screenshots, and saying “I ran it through AI” with the brazen chutzpah of a five-year-old affirming they brushed their teeth, when obviously they haven’t. Cure: Stop forcing people to use AI like it’s a corporate vitamin. Let them use it where it’s useful.

Agentic AI: Most people don’t really understand what this term means and use it incorrectly. Let me set you straight. Agentic AI is a chatbot that has been given errands and a terrifying amount of confidence.

^{THE SHALLOW END}

No AI, But Don’t Take Away My Screen Time

Hasan Piker, the self-described ‘Ayatollah of Woke’, doesn’t use AI and thinks it’s “rotting our brains”, which is bold from a man apparently spending industrial quantities of time on Twitter, Twitch, Discord, podcasts and whatever else keeps the rage economy working overtime. He freaks out about a lot of things during his streams while being mocked by other streamers and YouTubers. I remember one internet meltdown over his dog, Kaya, after viewers accused him of using an electric collar during a live stream, an allegation he denied.

Anyway, Wired gave him print time because he has a big fanbase who revel in his rants like “I’m fighting the battle in the trenches, directly in enemy territory.” So OTT. His AI take isn’t complete rubbish - he says it’s making humanity dumber. Fair. But judging history before AI, we were already managing that nicely on our own.

He’s an Executive Assistant whose job depends on judgement, timing, diplomacy and knowing which senior person is about to explode before the calendar does. Unfortunately, management now wants visible AI adoption. Can Dr Comms’ unusual experts help?

Dear Dr Comms
I’m an Executive Assistant at a company that has decided that every task must now involve AI, preferably via a dashboard. The problem is, my job involves reading the room, managing chaos, calming egos, protecting time, interpreting vague executive noises and knowing when “quick chat?” means “clear the next two hours.” AI keeps suggesting I “optimise workflows,” which is adorable. How do I look like I’m using AI without letting it anywhere near the CEO’s inbox? Yours, Manually Inclined.

Dear Manually Inclined
A delicate case of forced innovation. Let’s consult some specialists:

🧯 Fire Safety Inspector:
“Use AI the way you’d use a fire alarm: helpful early warning, not the person in charge of the evacuation. Ask it to draft checklists, summarise meeting notes and flag clashes in priorities. Then inspect every output yourself before anyone important walks into a smoke-filled calendar.”

🧳 Hotel Concierge:
“Let AI do the low-risk errands. Ask it to suggest agenda structures, draft polite replies, turn messy notes into neat action lists and prepare briefing summaries. But never let it deal directly with difficult guests, powerful egos or anyone who begins a sentence with ‘Just a quick one.’ That’s still human territory.”

🚓 Highway Patrol:
“You’re not refusing AI. You’re maintaining safe operating distance. Log one useful prompt per day, keep both hands on the wheel, and don’t let the chatbot merge into executive correspondence without supervision.”

Shallow Values: ‘Collaboration’

^{BIN THIS…}

Superintelligence
Because apparently “AI getting better” wasn’t dramatic enough.

Future of work
A phrase that usually means fewer people, more dashboards and a leadership team pretending this is destiny.

Human in the loop
Corporate comfort blanket for “we’re still legally nervous about letting loose all these trickywicky AI agents.”

Scale
The word tech people use when they want customers to believe they can grow dramatically by doing very little, except buying the AI.

Orchestration
Several tools are doing things while one person hopes the building doesn’t crash and burn.

Workflows
The beige plumbing of corporate life, now allegedly revolutionised.

Autonomous
AI is doing things on its own, except when it breaks, hallucinates, or needs six humans to supervise it.

Velocity
Speed in the direction of Mars, Pluto or somewhere cool in the Universe.

Did I just hear you say that you can’t or won’t get rid of these words because they’re essential in explaining your amazing AI solutions? Fine.

If you can’t bin them, at least ration them. But definitely bin them if your material contains any of the above more than 3 times in one paragraph.

Know someone who lives for this kind of nonsense? Forward this email to them and help me spread the dysfunction.

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